Technology

Summary: TikTok reached a confidential settlement just hours before jury selection in a US “social media addiction” case—avoiding becoming a defendant in what lawyers describe as a landmark trial. The bigger story is not one settlement. It’s a shift in how courts are being asked to view social platforms: not merely as neutral hosts of […]

Summary: Google has agreed to pay $68m to settle a lawsuit that alleged Google Assistant recorded private conversations after being triggered unintentionally. Google denied wrongdoing in the settlement filing, saying it sought to avoid litigation. The story matters because voice assistants sit at the boundary between convenience and surveillance. They are designed to listen for

Summary: Meta is preparing to trial premium subscriptions for Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp—while keeping core services free. The pitch is not “pay to use social media.” It’s pay for extra features, including expanded AI capabilities, and potentially higher limits on certain actions. This matters because it’s another step in a wider platform shift: ad-funded social

Summary: TikTok’s new US joint venture has updated its privacy policy to allow the collection of precise location data (depending on user settings). That sounds like a minor wording change, but it’s strategically important because TikTok is simultaneously being reorganised under a US-focused structure designed to address national‑security concerns about data access and algorithm influence.

Summary: India is already a global heavyweight in chip design, but it still depends on overseas manufacturing for most semiconductors. After Covid-era shortages exposed how fragile supply chains can be, India is trying to build a domestic semiconductor ecosystem—starting not with the most advanced chip “fabs,” but with packaging, assembly, and testing. The story is

Summary: A growing number of US companies are experimenting with Chinese open-source AI models because they’re fast, cheap, and can be customised—especially after what some leaders call the “DeepSeek moment.” The shift isn’t about whether the US or China has the single best closed model. It’s about whether open-source ecosystems—where Chinese labs are increasingly prominent—are

Summary: Several Caribbean nations have been building legal cannabis industries focused on regulated domestic sales, medicinal products, and eventual exports. Producers argue that over‑regulation keeps most demand in illicit markets, while policymakers and researchers point to potential benefits ranging from medical uses to agricultural research. This is primarily an industry and regulation story: how a

Summary: A growing number of young founders are launching AI-first startups with unusual speed—because modern AI tools compress the time it takes to build and test products. But the same forces that make it easier to start also make it easier to build fragile businesses: hype outruns fundamentals, and “growth” can hide weak margins, weak

Summary: TikTok has a new US ownership-and-governance structure designed to address Washington’s national security concerns — and that will likely change how the app is operated, secured, and updated for its roughly 200 million American users. The big promise is continuity (same app, same creators, broadly the same experience). The big question is whether a

Summary: TikTok’s deal to split its US app from its global business is a high-stakes compromise: it keeps TikTok running for 200 million Americans while trying to satisfy national security concerns about Chinese ownership. The technical heart of the deal is the algorithm — licensed to US owners and retrained on US data — and